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💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Lightseer’s Gaze Wondrous item, legendary (requires attunement by a monk) ___

This flourished mask obscures your eyes and magically stays in place while worn. It once belonged to a wise spiritual leader whose name has been lost to time, but was said to have eschewed personal belongings. While wearing the mask and attuned to it, you gain the following benefits:

• You have blindsight out to a range of 120 feet, and truesight out to a range of 60 feet. You are blind beyond this radius. Despite being blind, you can still see the moon, stars, and sun when they’re in the sky above you.

• Your Wisdom score changes to 21. This property has no effect on you if your Wisdom is already 21 or higher without the mask.

• You have advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks.

• You can spend 3 ki points as an action to cast the "spirit guardians" spell (save DC 16).

• You can use an action to spend 2 ki points to cast the "calm emotions" spell (save DC 16). Alternatively, if you speak to a hostile creature for 1 minute, it must succeed on a DC 20 Charisma saving throw or become indifferent about creatures of your choice that it is hostile toward, as if affected by the "calm emotions" spell (no concentration required). If a creature succeeds on the saving throw in this way, it’s immune to the effects of this property for 24 hours.

𝘾𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚. This item is cursed, and attuning to it extends that curse to you. You can’t remove the mask while cursed in this way. You remain cursed until it’s ended by a "wish" spell or similar magic. When you become cursed, your name remains known to only you but becomes lost to the rest of the universe, at the GM’s discretion. You must choose a new name. This new name replaces every instance of your lost name throughout history, and becomes the only known name for you among all creatures who once knew your lost name. While cursed, you take 5d10 psychic damage whenever you attempt to speak, write, or otherwise share or communicate your lost name. Regardless of how you attempt to share the lost name, it always comes across as your new one. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for only $1 to $7 a month!

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Dungeon: May my Grave be Green

May I walk in light and rest in shade/ 

May I find good work for this borrowed blade/

May I smile at pending rain and passing years/ 

May I live with heart open and cry many tears/ 

My my song be sufficient to inspire new dreams/

May I die with honor/

May my grave be green/

-Oath of the Verdant Order of St.Tormid, disbanded. 

Adventure Hooks: 

There’s an old fortress out on the moors, crumbling and overgrown. The local baron wants to build a new castle on its foundations but rumors say it’s haunted. Not trusting peasant superstition, the baron hires the party to investigate, hoping that the adventurers will flush out whatever ghosts or boogiemen happen to be lurking within, or at least save him the trouble of sending his own men to exterminate any monsters lairing nearby. 

An elderly relative of the party/ one of their allies dies, and leaves them with a small bequeathment with a very strange request. Rather than being buried in the family plot or cremated in line with local religious custom, they want their bones transported to a disused tomb in the middle of nowhere. To those who undertake this task, they have left a heavy signet depicting two crowned( horned?) figures dancing around a tree, along with a note saying that it is to be shown only to the gatekeeper, for to do elsewise would be to invite the attention of old enemies. 

The Pursuit of a highwayman wanted for both robbery and murder leads the party to a crumbling ruin, possibly the villain’s lair, or just an opportunistic site for a clever ambush. Cautiously hunting through the subterranean halls, their quarry taunts them, detailing the ways he might kill them each unawares.. before suddenly being cut off.  The highwayman’s decapitated head rolls into the light of the party’s torch, a look of aghast surprise stuck forever on his face.   Something waits in the depth of these ruins, and it’s carrying a very sharp sword. 

Setup: These ruins are in fact a chapterhouse of a long disbanded holy order, warriors who held to a sacred creed of honor, beauty, and love of nature’s splendor. Though decades have passed, one of their number remains, given long life by the strength of her oaths and the nessesity of her station. She guards the tombs of her brethren knights, and has sworn to do so until the villains that destroyed their order are defeated. 

With so few knights remaining of her creed, Ser Bertilak is resigned to wait forever, and has no qualms about letting the party loot and explore the rest of the ruin, provided they leave the tombs be. Should she sense a vein of honor in one of the party, she will ask them to become her agent in the outside world, seeing just how far the order’s devastation goes.  In doing so, the player may become worthy of joining the Verdant Order themselves, inheriting all its wisdom, as well as its many enemies. 

Keep reading

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Greetings!

On this snowy forest battle map your party can have a really cool time blasting their enemies away with the aid of clever positioning.

They can use the elevated terrain to their advantage and use the dense foliage so their enemies don’t stand a chance!

The crossroads is a good place as any to rob some caravans too, should the adventurers be of the evil inclination.

You can see a preview of this map’s Patreon content by clicking here.

If you liked the map I’d be extremely thankful if you considered supporting me on my Patreon, rewards include higher resolution files, gridless versions, alternate versions, line versions, PSDs and more. Thank you!

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I was wondering if you could do some random city job notices for the small adventurers guild of a somewhat medium sized city? My players are the adventurers guild and Ii feel kinda bad only having one or two job options for them each session. The town is a port town with a mine nearby that secretly leads to part of the underdark where a cult of the god of death and greed lives.

Settlement: Drenmawr on the Water, The shining city of Hope

First impressions:  There is no sight quite like Drenmawr at dawn. From up atop the green hills that shelter the city, you can see the whole valley laid out before you, shrouded in the morning’s mist with only the crying birds, the tallest towers, and the smoke of chimneys breaking the haze.  Then as the sun rises in the horizon, the great citadel catches its light and begins to shine, and from there the whole city begins to resolve, like something out of a dream. Everyone deserves to see this at least once in their life, be they traveler, or Drenmawr local, as it is one of the great beauties of our age. 

-A wanderer’s guidebook to the cities of the basilisk coast, 6th edition

Background:  Drenmawr is a city built on hope, populated by a resilient people who saw their original home ( Drenmawr on the hill) destroyed in a climatic battle nearly two centuries ago. Rather than scattering to the winds and giving into despair, the survivors of that calamity banded together, and made a coordinated effort to move and rebuild their home, this time several dozen miles downriver in a place that could be better defended in times to come.    Drenmawr on the water has indeed weathered several more battles,  transforming from simple defensive fort to a prosperous trade settlement made rich by oceanic commerce and the mines in the surrounding hills. 

Today the city is known especially for its coppersmiths: producing everything from roofing tiles ( giving the city its distinctive shine), to jewelry, to some of the best cannons and churchbells along the coast. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Due to a climatic series of misadventures, the new bell that was supposed to grace the city’s largest temple to Pelor has ended up at the bottom of the channel separating the mainland portion of the city from its island counterpart.  The Foundry in question is VERY eager to retrieve their very expensive masterwork as otherwise they’ll be on the hook for its replacement, and are willing to hire a group of adventurers to go delving in the deep to do so. To complicate matters further, an avaricious merfolk has claimed the bell for his own with the intent of extorting those who come to retrieve it, and TECHNICLY by rites of salvage, it does belong to him. Will the party manage to pay the the waterfey’s odd and costly price, or will they steal the bell back, possibly incurring some kind of curse along the way? 

There’s always something going wrong in the ruins of old Drenmawr, monsters, bandits, a good old fashioned haunting. Since the new city was officially established, there has been a movement to divert some of its resources to the reestablishment of Drenmawr-on-the-Hill. Largely supported by those family's who still own land in the region, these resettlement attempts have repeatedly failed due to mismanagement, or the harsh resistance of whatever forces happen to be squatting in the ruins of the old city. THIS expedition is going to be different, swears the representative of the historical society: a delve into Old Drenmawr’s administrative buildings to recover documents of historical and architectural import. Surely the party can expect less resistance because of the lack of treasure inherent to the site, right? .... right? 

A booming mining trade means a prosperous sub industry of surveyers, panners, and prospectors combing through the region to find new veins, or exploring old, disused claims for signs of wealth yet to be uncovered. These subteranian explorers frequently need escort, as the wilds and manmade caverns they frequent are frequently the lair of some sort of vicious creature. 

Further Adventures: 

After a few expeditions into monster filled caves and abandoned mines, the party has made fast friends with a pair of gnomish brothers by the name of Umni and Jergim Brightseem. These fortune hunting geologists will talk your ear off about claim-rites and oxidization rates of the local strata for hours, but they pay well and have a knack for finding work that’s worth the risk.   One day however, Jergim comes to the party hat in hand. Umni has disappeared, taken by something while they were scouting out their next delve into a half collapsed mine known only as “ TheToll Pit” .. and he needs the party to mount a rescue,  this time without the promise of commission. 

Unbeknownst to the brothers, “The Toll Pit” was owned by Phinneas “Toll-Man” Tollard, a secret priest of Torag, the wormgod, who “mismanaged” the enterprise to extract the most profit while providing sacrifices to his patron. While working his employees like slaves,  he engineered frequent collapses, numerous attacks from underdark beasts, and a winding complex of tunnels that took months of effort and many lives for no reward. Though the mine is closed and Phinneas is long dead, his wealthy descendants still keep the faith, and will be displeased to learn that anyone is poking around their family’s secret sacrifice cave. 

A generation ago, When work dried up in several other local mines, Phinneas recruited every out of work wretch he could find, packed in as many as he could, then called upon his god to collapse the whole thing on top of them.  Dozens were crushed, with hundreds buried alive, and this sacrifice was strong enough to open a permanent portal into the undermark, calling an aspect of the wormgod himself to appear and feast on the trapped and hopeless workers.  Though the rite is long over, the crawling king’s passage still marks the Toll Pit, both in the multitude of scattered bones left over from his victims, and the numerous writhing beasts he left behind in his wake. Rescuing Umni is only the first step in delving this massive dungeon, one that waits to swallow the party should they go too far into the dark. 

For the Asker in question:  Honestly friend, don’t worry about coming up with too many “random” city adventure hooks. You’re a writer, not a computer algorithm, so focus on improving the quality of your adventures rather than the quantity of them.  Being part of the adventurers’ guild isn’t THE STORY for your group, it’s only the FRAMING DEVICE for the stories you’re CURRENTLY telling. The trick to making good random encounters isn’t just making MORE of them, it’s mastering the storytelling device of “ while your group was off doing random thing X, they got entangled in ongoing concern Y”.   If you’re looking for some randomness, I’d suggest maybe checking out @creativerogues‘s numerous tables, or the dndspeak blog, then using those as the framing device for whatever larger story you’d like to tell. 

Hope that helps!

Art Source: 

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💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Chronal Sphere Wondrous item, very rare ___

This brass sphere is roughly fist-sized and weighs 1 pound. It vibrates gently while you hold it as tiny mechanisms whir inside. While holding the sphere, you can use a bonus action to speak its command word, causing spectral clock hands to appear on its curved surface and indicate the current time. The hands remain on the surface of the sphere until you speak the command word again. This property only functions on the Material Plane.

𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨. While holding the sphere, you can use an action to cast either the "haste" or "slow" spell (save DC 18, no concentration required) from it. Once the sphere has been used to cast a spell in this way, it can’t be used to cast that spell again. When the sphere has been used to cast both of these spells, it loses this property. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for only $1 to $7 a month!

[grave-domain]

43 Things To Sell To A Fey...

A Wedding Ring meant for a Bride to be.

A Portrait painted by a Familiar.

Three true answers to the Fey’s questions.

The Character’s clothes.

One of the Character’s senses.

The Character’s dreams.

A Coin used in a coin flip.

A Favour.

Your Character’s dying breath.

Your Character’s Luck.

One Year of the Character’s Life.

A minute of your Character’s time.

A Lasting Scar.

Your Character’s shadow.

A story.

A tooth.

A poem or song written by the Character.

The music from a Character’s instrument.

A kiss.

A moment of your honour.

A lock of your Character’s hair.

A night of good sleep.

Your Character’s voice.

The Character’s first born child.

The colour of your hair.

The colour of your skin.

The colour of your eyes.

The colour of your blood.

The taste of your favourite ale.

The feel of the ocean wind in your hair.

The pleasant sting of a freshly drawn hot bath.

The names of mortals whom you have at least dined with.

The eyes of an eagle.

The heart of a hero.

The fingers of a thief.

The eggs of birds, young animals, or new-born mortal children.

Permanent permission into your home or place of work.

The key to a castle.

Invitation to a ceremony your are attending.

A strong working animal.

A treasure stolen from a goblin.

A secret.

All your silver pieces.

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Hi! The theme in my upcoming campaign is the consequences of imperialism, and I'm going to show that theme through a war between two empires and the devastation it causes. However, I'm unsure how to characterize the empires besides good vs evil, which I want to avoid. I also want to avoid making the tone too dark and depressing; the party should feel like there's something they can do about it that matters. I also want to have a dragon fight that doesn't feel contrived. Any advice or ideas?

Adventure: The Protectorate, and its Price

Loyalty to the Haladrans offers three things, sure as the sun will come up tomorrow: Peace, prosperity, and a gun to the back of your head. You’d be surprised how much of the world is willing to take that deal. 

Setup: The coastal nation of Eandoca is perhaps one of the most beautiful you might ever visit, as every inch of its rolling, bucolic landscape seems as artiful and manicured as a pleasure garden, its people happy, it’s settlements clean and free of suffering. This is not the result of some edenic quirk of nature, but the careful and deliberate oversight by the Protectorate of Ven-Haladra, an occupying military force that sees this land and the people within it as an orchardkeeper might see a tree: something to be nourished, pruned, and cultivated so long as it continues to bear fruit. 

No one seems to mind the Haladrans, their iron grip is light, and they rule through native proxies, fools raised in fortresses turned pleasure gardens where their education has instilled them with a deep love of their nation’s culture and beauty, and a total reliance on their Protectorate advisors to make decisions. 

Life goes on however, and the tension between The colonizer’s patronizing, not-tyranny and Eandoca’s growing prosperity as the Protectorate’s foremost trade port is growing. The flow of wealth means the development of new industries and new learning that the Protectorate can’t sanitize, and the human spirit always bucks against captivity, even if it can’t see the chains. 

Adventure Hooks: 

By preventing their subjugated lands from raising their own militias, the Protectorate simultaneously enforces their monopoly on military power and ensures that same military governance is stretched very thin. Criminals need to be caught, monsters need to be driven off, and by preventing the Eandocans from forming their own garrisons the Protectorate forms a reliance on mercenary adventurers to do the same. Whether drawn from locals put under direct protectorate control or hired from elsewhere and shipped to a problem region, there is good work to be had for a sellsword looking to make their fortune, provided they’re willing to deal with constant scrutiny and hand off any moral judgements to a colonial administrator. 

Something is desperately wrong in one of the palace gardens. Petitioners wait in a great line outside the door for appointments that are weeks overdue, and the gates remain shut with no sign of movement inside. Though it may be culturally taboo to say so, someone ( or a group of someones) should find a way inside ( scale the wall maybe, or find one of those fabled secret entrances among the foundations? ), and see what’s going on exactly. Inside the party will find a bizarre sickness has swept through the palace, leaving many dead and most in an exhausted torpor. The one witness who could tell them exactly what was going on would be Ambasitor Yiji, one of the higher dryad diplomats the Protectorate employs to carry their will seamlessly between their holdings. Problem is, the sickness seems to have affected Yiji in some odd way, causing her to become an almost feral thing of roots and vines that’s territorially protecting the garden where her bonded tree grows.  

Blood spills, gunsmoke fills the air, and the drums of war begin their distant, ominous beat. As the tale goes, a week ago a group of sailors from a rival empire were getting rowdy in port , their carousing escalating to violence and assault against several Eandocan townsfolk. The Protectorate garrison was called in to quell the disturbance, but ended up as part of some kind of colonial imperialistic feedback loop. The garrison thrashed the sailors, who limped back home to their ship and told all their fellows about how “unfriendly” the locals had been. Full of patriotism and machismo, the foreigners found the Garrisonhouse and set it on fire, as the doctrinal Ven-Haladran answer to insurrection is “ take them out back and shoot them while speaking calming platitudes “ this turned out to be a bad idea.  Days pass, things escalate, and a couple of the foreign ships end up firing on the port in revenge for a third that’s sinking into the bay with all hands aboard.    This is a diplomatic massacre, one that neither side will apologies for anytime soon, which will have dire consequences in the days to come. 

Background: To read the accepted histories , a generation or so ago the Land of Eandoca was a chaotic patchwork of warlords and bandit kings. Having suffered through a century of strife after the collapse of their corrupt and oligarchical ruling dynasty, the people cried out for salvation and The Protectorate of Ven-Haladra  answered. These foreign allies (opportunistic expansionists) waged a campaign of pacification against the scattered dynastic holdouts and other belligerents, then established a new, just, ruling power ( puppet state) under their enlightened and abstracted guidance ( total administrative and military control). 

As colonial overlords go, the Protectorate is not the cruelest, but it is the most patronizing: enforcing an idealized, pastoral way of life on the subjugated Eandocan populace while cultivating their country like one would a newly tilled garden. They even minimalize their place in history while warping it to their purpose: the warring states era they interceded in was well over two centuries ago, but in order to make their occupation seem to be a “temporary” measure, their presence always necessary to prevent a backslide into chaos, they keep it just outside of the living memory, keeping history texts vauge and ensuring their colonial subjects live in half remembered dream of their own history. 

Such illusions of ignorance and false reality have let the Ven-Haladra hold onto almost a dozen such colonial holdings across their home continent, purposefully isolated, culturally stagnant, and carefully monitored, all while the Protectorate grows ever more advanced and prosperous by their purloined wealth. 

Ven-Haladra calls itself “ The Provisional Empire” implying there is some future state at which it will no longer be necessary to perform such barbarous conquests. It sees its absorption and cultural gaslighting of its neighbors as a kindness, sparing them from the heavy duties of having to interface with the cruelties of the world at large, preserving their cultures in amber until the empire is capable of “uplifting” them to the proper state.

To the Asker: Hi there, I hope that gives you something to go off of! It’s always difficult to detail full campaigns in a single prompt. That said, I think the pitch of “showing the fallout of empire while also showing them clash” is great,  though I’ll add the caviat that the party should belong atleast inpart to the Colonized, as being a third party who stands to gain/lose based on the outcome of that conflict will lead to some interesting thematic tensions. 

I started with Ven-Haladra because I think it’s a great “ devil you know” when it comes to colonial occupation. Its evil, but in the same way that Disney is evil, ubiquitous and condescending, happy to make you happy so long as you keep being productive. Ideally, they’d be put up against a destructive, transformative empire ( Peace vs Chaos) that wants to throw its weight around and doesn’t care about the consequences. Do the party use this disaster to free their home from their current oppressor ? Do they become heroes of the status quo, then use that influence as leverage for more independence? 

I think you’d want to run this campaign with a few time skips, act 1 happening totally under Ven-Haladra’s thumb, establishing the norms and ending with that fight in the harbor, act 2 is the war itself, the two empires clashing with Eandocan as the battleground, and act 3 is determining is facing off against whoever the victor of that war might be. 

Hope that helps, and if you end up running with any of this, please let me know how it goes!

Art Source 1

Art Source 2

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Greetings!

Let’s get frosty with a new snowy environment, a frozen lake in the woods for all your ice-skating needs (You just know someone in the party might try that at least once).

So, as the title implies, the battle map features a lake that’s been frozen. Make your players fall on their behinds as they desperately try to attack their enemies in a vain attempt to save their, well, behinds.

There’s plenty of gnarled trees surrounding the lake, providing good cover but bad line of sight. This way everyone will have to make a choice as to try to battle it out on the trees or try their luck moving through the ice.

Also, if any of your players move through the ice, do try to make them fall to the cold water below. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the cool, refreshing dip! Maybe.

You can see a preview of this week’s content by clicking here.

If you liked the map I’d be extremely thankful if you considered supporting me on my Patreon, rewards include higher resolution files, gridless versions, alternate versions, line versions, PSDs and more. Thank you!

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Gather around children, ol’ saint Neutral Party has a gift for all the good boys and girls! Ah, you there, come forward- you’ve been extra good this year! For you I’ve put aside a fine gift, a map of a musty, fungus-infested cave filled with destroyed, squalid ruins. I can see you’re overwhelmed with emotion, I understand. Be sure to be just as good next year, I have a map of a bone-riddled oil pit with your name on it! Now, I must be off, there are millions of good children out there who need luxury JPGs for digital tabletop games, and if I’m still delivering them when the sun comes out then I’ll turn to stone. Goodbye children!

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Hey, everyone!

Today bring you another cave map, you could use this in combination with my other cave map that I recently released since I think they go very well thematically.

The map itself features both crystals and mushrooms which you can give some pretty neat magical properties to. Or you can make the mushrooms very poisonous and have the party carefully go through the cave.

On the left hand side of the map there’s a chasm where you can send your players further down below if you so desire, I just hope they’re proficient on their climbing skills!

The creature tokens for this week are an Ancient Black Dragon, a Gray Ooze and a Yochlol. Emerald gets the Ancient Black Dragon while Diamond gets all three.

You can see a preview of all of this week’s Patreon content here.

Thank you very much for taking a look and be sure to check out my Patreon where you can pledge for gridless version, alternate map versions as well as the tokens pertaining to this map.

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Some more creatures to use in the feywild. Wanted to focus a bit more on creatures that can be used on land or water. And also a volcano turtle. Yep. Have fun! EDIT: Thank you to the 400 people who have informed me that the first picture I used was a creature from monster hunter. Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never played. A lot of rude messages since I put this up. Seems some people think I’m claiming to have drawn and designed this creature. Not sure why they think that, but hey, you do you.

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Some home brewed more mundane magic for a high fantasy campaign. Of course feel free to adapt this with your mechanics. I came up with these and a few others for a Herbalist character one of my players in the Drake Canpaign has made. I wanted to give her a way of excercising her background and abilities without making it over the top.

Look forward to a round of other ideas/items I’m working on rn that I hope to get out soon!

Feel free to reblog and share! Please don’t remove my caption.

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Adventure: A Warrior’s Weary Plea

“ Hear me young warrior, as you reach for the cup of all of life’s joys and woes. Drink your fill and drink no more, for in my greed I upended the cup and have found myself drowned .” 

Setup: When he was a young warrior, Geolff completed a great trial and earned the right to ask a boon from the gods. Knowing that he was hale and handsome, and that there were no riches that could not be won by the strength of his arm, he wished for a life unending, that he may exist forever at the apex of his heroism, never tasting defeat or the ignominy of weakness and age. 

Since then many songs have been sung about Geolff the tireless, Geolff of the endless saga, Geolff who ran long enough to catch the setting sun, Geolff who charged the Skull-Fain’s legion alone and laughed as he cut himself free of their pikes. While the songs to mention here and there the losses the storied warrier as suffered in his long life, they do not recount the innumerable sorrows that weigh upon his heart. Geolff has lived but eighty years past that of a mortal warrior, and already his brave and courageous heart is filled up with melancholy. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Following word of a direbear threatening a village, the Party encounters Geolff resting against its lacerated corpse, both of their wounds still steaming in the snow. While Geolff’s boon spares him the risk of any debilitating or mortal injury, when the battle rage leaves him he is often left to suffer his old flesh knitting itself back together.  Hiding his true identity and claiming to be a passing warrior who got extremely lucky in his battle with the beast, Geolff will let the party escort him back to town, and share mead and stories with them as he recovers beside the hearth. If they prove the worthy sort, Geolff may travel with them for a while, becoming their unseen protector and trying to pass on a little of his war-craft to them. His true nature will only be revealed when after some time traveling together, the immortal warrior will step in to save one of the party from an otherwise lethal blow, suffering the wound himself and exposing his boon in the process. 

Above all things, Geolff wishes for an ending, a right he feels was extended to every creature and thing in existence but denied to him. He regrets his hasty wish, and seeks to be reunited with his lovers, wife, and children in the afterlife. To this end, he peruses word of encounters with the Valkyrie, for perhaps these celestial harbingers can finally escort him to the halls of the beyond.  Such encounters are rare, but apparently there’s been sightings of a winged woman in the far north, somewhere near a ruined city that was once the sight of a climatic siege. 

Following their immortal ally on his quest, the party must fight through engulfing blizzards and rugged wilderness, eventually being forced to  take shelter in the dungeon they sought to explore. While the storm rages outside, the party discovers the ruins are haunted by drauger, warriors so unwilling to depart the mortal world that they’ve taken the Valkyrie hostage in the depths of the castle. With a blizzard at their back, an immortal at their side, and a ruin full of undead before them, our heroes have no choice but to freeze or fight their way through. 

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*toot toot*

Here’s some magic nail polish for you!

I would perhaps advise not giving them to a party with a monk; I would certainly recommend not giving them to a party with multiple monks. I would however, highly recommend that you give them to a party of all monks, because that would be stupid. 

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saturday d&d tip: although d&d discourages railroading, sometimes you just need to make the party take a long rest because they’re about to walk into a boss battle with no spell slots. to compromise, consider making the guardians of these areas something the players will find deeply unsettling and creepy, such as:

Swarming Bugs With Too Many Legs

A glittery, levitating white orb with an unidentifiable magic aura

Incel guards

A single, faceless mannequin that eerily resembles a party member

A pair of twins about the age of seven who speak in unison

A serene, elderly woman who knits in her rocking chair, apparently oblivious to the eldritch horrors amongst which she dwells

A friendly gatekeeper who, on closer inspection, is an incredibly lifelike marionette with an unseen controller

These and other options will surely induce paranoia, discomfort, and anxiety in your players, and they are far more likely to second-guess their plan to stroll casually into the next chamber.

[grave-domain]

Hello, everyone!

This week I present to you a new cave map! I was in the mood of doing a cavern that had lots of vegetation in it. Inside your players will find a small pool of water. This water may have magic properties, something that I’ll leave up to you guys.

You could use this as the final section of a larger set of caverns, a place where your players can perhaps fight an end boss. Because maybe he’s guarding the magical water!

The cave has a lot of unique-looking mushrooms as well so your players can use them to craft rare potions to aid them in their travels.

The creature tokens for this week are a Mind Flayer, a Vine Blight and a Young Green Dragon. Emerald gets the Young Green Dragon while Diamond gets all three.

You can see a preview of all of this week’s Patreon content here.

Thank you very much for taking a look and be sure to check out my Patreon where you can pledge for gridless version, alternate map versions as well as the tokens pertaining to this map.

[grave-domain]

1d12 Cool Environments Inspired By Real Places!

Split Volcano. A volcano split in two by a thundering earthquake.

Black River. A river that passes through a volcanic valley, picking up the tiny fragments of basalt from the black sand beaches and causing the river itself to appear black in colour.

Red Grass. Grass that grows in a naturally rainy or wet environment, causing them to grow red.

Frozen Volcano. A glacier that exists on the summit of a volcano.

Underground Sky. Clouds of particulates that exist underground, creating their own subterranean clouds!

Underground Volcano. An under-developed volcanic region that has yet to erupt!

Dark Forest. An underground forest that grows entirely in the dark.

Bio-luminescence. Bio-luminescence in leaves, fungus, underground denizens and plants.

Underwater Forest. Trees or plants that grow entirely underwater, creating forests of seaweed and kelp that could provide a neat underwater encounter, with partial cover too!

Fiery Canyons. Deep canyons in the world that extend so deep there’s a literal river of magma at the bottom!

Deep Lakes. A lake that extends downwards for literal miles!

Geysers! Geysers that spray scalding hot water (and anything else caught in it) hundreds of feet into the air!

These environments are all inspired by real life places and environments. 

What’s a weird area of the world that you think would be cool to see in your D&D Games, let us know in the comments and re-blogs!